Come Find Me(10)

    Though I did just accuse her of trespassing, so.

Even there, at the edge of the property, she’s hard not to notice. Lydia’s tall and thin and has these hazel eyes offset by her brown skin, which makes you look twice. When I first met her through Marco (This is my friend Lydia), I was on the edge of jealousy and insecurity, but it soon became obvious that Lydia was only interested in Sutton, and vice versa.

“Well,” she says, peering at the house over my shoulder instead of at me, “what are we looking at?”

“Either the computer in the shed or the satellite dish,” I say, walking toward the makeshift observatory.

“A dish issue is not the same thing as a computer issue, you know,” she mumbles.

Her steps fall in sync with my own, crunching the dead grass underneath our feet, dry from lack of water and scorched by the sun. The antenna on top of the shed flashes with the reflecting sun before a cloud passes overhead.

Lydia wrinkles her nose when I open the shed door, because the first thing you notice is the dim light, the dust particles suspended in the air, the smell of earth and wood.

“Oh,” she says. “Wow.” Because the second thing you notice is Elliot’s setup: three computer monitors, several humming towers under the desk, and a tangle of wires threading through a hole in the wall, and then underground—where they run in a path to the satellite dish. At least, I think. I never paid much attention to the logistics. There’s also a drawer full of cables, headphones, and speakers, like Elliot truly believed he’d make direct contact with something out there one day. He was like that: sometimes more focused on the great possibilities out there than on what was staring him in the face.

    Once, when he was working on his laptop at the kitchen table, my mom told him he absolutely needed a haircut, that he was looking particularly ridiculous, and that really, how could he even see what he was doing? Instead of brushing her off, like a normal person would, he paused for thirty seconds to take the scissors from the drawer beside the refrigerator. He ran the blade through the hair in front of his eyes, shaking out the dark strands as they fell into the trash can. Then he returned to his seat while my mom and I stared at each other, openmouthed. Until eventually her shoulders started shaking with silent laughter, and mine followed less silently, and Elliot shook himself from his world long enough to grin at us from under his uneven bangs.

Lydia doesn’t wait for instructions from me; she makes herself comfortable in the chair in front of the terminal, and she begins by pressing a few keys. Her mouth scrunches up, but she leans closer to the screen, now illuminated with the green-on-black readout, with peaks and valleys and numbers below. “Is there a manual somewhere?” she asks. But she’s still looking at the screen.

The rest of the shed is empty. Wooden planks, a small window with a view of the satellite dish, which is planted in the center of the ground, pointed up. There’s just this computer desk and chair inside now.

“I can check,” I say. Somewhere in the house is a box of Elliot’s personal items, where his journals or manuals would be. We’ve kept all his things, but the Realtor or the stager tucked those boxes out of sight—upstairs in the storage area, she said, like it was no big deal. I shift from foot to foot until Lydia turns around, focusing her eyes on mine. Waiting. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

    The heat and the sun beat down on the back of my neck. But there’s something in the air when I walk toward the house, something that feels like static electricity, that makes my hair stand on end. I try to shake it off as I crawl through Elliot’s bedroom window again, like I did Friday night.

The air conditioner is set to cooler than I was expecting, or maybe it’s just the contrast with the outside heat, but a chill runs through me as I exit his room. Next: the hallway. To the right is my room, and then the living room, where the pictures still hang at odd angles. To the left are the steps at the back of the house, leading to the loft on the second floor.

When Joe and I were arguing about the house, I told him we could renovate this part. Cut out this section of the house, block it off, redesign it. With just the two of us, the downstairs is more than enough anyway.

But for now, here it is.

I place my hand on the wooden banister, my thumb on a groove of wood.

There’s a new layer of paint here, on the walls. Fresh carpeting. The railing has been replaced with a beam made of reddish wood, smooth and polished. It’s darker here than the rest of my house, tucked away from the windows. But I don’t turn the light on.

    It’s my house and it’s not my house. Close your eyes, and the shadow house is here. I keep my eyes down and step sideways on the first step. I skip the next one. I feel like a fool, as if I’m like Joe, who won’t set foot here at all. As if where I place my feet now will make any difference.

It’s just a step. Just a house. I try to picture a stranger’s house instead. Wood and nails and carpet. But my imagination will not play.

Still, I keep moving, one foot in front of the other, until I’m on the second-floor landing.

To my right is the television room, and to my left, the storage area—a room halfway between the size of a closet and a bedroom. The inside smells of cardboard and ozone, like no one has opened the door in months. None of the boxes are labeled. There was no point. It wasn’t like Elliot was going to need them anymore, asking us, Which box has my clothes? or Where are the books? So it’s sort of a job now, piecing through them.